Sweet as Honey

Posted on June 25, 2014 by dcarmack

There isn’t much that is more satisfying to the sweet tooth than the natural goodness of honey. Perfected by nature over millions of years, somehow bees create the perfect table sweetener, seemingly just for our pleasure. Personally, I love the unique tang of honey and prefer it greatly to table sugar or any other sweetener. Nobody could say anything bad about eating honey. It has to be way better that eating table sugar…

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If you really think about honey, though, is it really something nature intended us to be able to eat every morning at breakfast? Even though there are a great number of glowing health claims about honey, there are a couple of things that should make eating it on a regular basis the exception in a human life. Does nature really intend for us to eat honey? First, honey is protected by thousands of heavily armed guards. The fact that to get to honey stores we have to knock the guards out with smoke and wear full body armor is a clue to how often we should be eating honey. Also, it is usually found in very remote and hard to reach locations, the kind that Pooh had to climb to get, and that when he got there was in a tight spot, well hidden. Building convenient boxes for our bees to put the honey in that are easy to open and easy to reach kind of defeats the plan of nature. She obviously does not intend that we eat honey every day.

In fact, most bees are not raised by man for the purpose of making honey. The normal job that the bee performs that is much more important to our day to day lives is pollinating flowering fruits. Perhaps you have heard that in this job, the European Honeybee is in mortal danger. Modern bee-keeping practices combined with modern farming practices are resulting in the destruction of over one third of the bee colonies nationwide every winter. Contributing factors include mono-culture, where we raise epic areas of a single crop, creating enormous food deserts for the bee, modern pesticides, where the pesticide is built right into the seeds that we plant, modern herbicides and fungicides, whose effects on adult bees are monitored, but whose effects on juvenile brood bees is not, bee-keeping that involves trucking our bees tens of thousands of miles per year, mingling bees and bee diseases from all over the world in California once per year, stressing the natural methods that bees live, work and reproduce.

Another deterrent to eating honey at every meal should be the difficulty that there is in determining where your honey actually comes from. Honey from China suffers from Chinese agriculture practices too, but for us it means pesticides banned in the US are found in Chinese honey. The way that you can determine whether your honey originated in your country is to collect and analyze the trace amounts of pollen found within it, then you examine the DNA of that pollen. In other words, you can’t. Only your government could do such a thing, and good government costs money, and since that money would have to come from taxes, you won’t be getting the benefit of that kind of good government any time soon. The label on the honey bottle would be no better of a guide, since counterfeit honey is a booming business as you can see from this news report…

How could a person be sure that purchased honey was the real deal? The same way that a person could be sure that their beef was the real deal, buy it from one of your local foods groups. Here in Kansas City you could check out the suppliers through the Kansas City Food Circle. If you aren’t from Kansas City, try Googling ” ‘your town’ local food growers”. That’s how I found KC Food Circle. Your local group will be able to put you in contact with your local source of all natural local honey. Local honeys also have the benefit of protecting you against local allergens. I know, that is a health claim, but I happen to believe it. 🙂

I suppose if you have to have a sweetener, honey is probably the best of the lot. If you feel like you have to have honey every day, perhaps many times per day, you may want to examine your sweets consumption. It is my feeling that nature didn’t intend for you to eat sweets that often. For proof, look at how often they are available where you live. Here in Missouri we have a few weeks of melons and berries per year, a few weeks of peaches, apples, pears and other flowering fruits. Later on we would get sweet corn, then all winter long and most of the spring there is not really much in the natural sweetener department for us to eat. Only by freighting these things from remote reaches of the world are they available to us to eat in excess. Only by mechanically and chemically extracting the sweetness are we able to eat enough to actually poison ourselves with the bounty of nature. In that case it is too much of a good thing.

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What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger?

Posted on June 24, 2014 by dcarmack

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, unless you are talking about food. If your food doesn’t serve you, you shouldn’t eat it. There are a great deal of things these days that are available for you to eat or drink that will slowly debilitate you. If you eat them long enough they will contribute to your untimely death after first crippling and blinding you. It is not up for debate whether or not sugar will cause your Type II diabetes. It will. Will you definitely get it? Maybe you will not. If you don’t get it, will you have some other problem, for certain? It is not definite. In that respect your problems with certain foods are just like the known problems with tobacco. Not everyone gets mouth cancer from chewing tobacco, but it is definite that some people do.

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The standard for what we should or should not eat must not come from the government only. Just as I would not drive 120 miles per hour even if it were not illegal, I don’t count on government regulations to keep me safe as far as my food is concerned–neither should you.

What do we know so far? We know that eating meats that were raised on their natural foods, like cows in grass, chickens in insects and grass, pigs that are free to forage contain oils that we cannot make ourselves. We know that products that are artificially low in fats are also artificially high in carbs or sugars. We know that lots of people have negative reactions to food coloring. We know that if we eat too much energy in a day that it will be converted to fats, and that it takes an enormous amount of exercise to work that fat off. We know that no agency of the government is testing food additives for their safety in studies like they have for drugs. We know that there are currently over ten thousand artificial products added to our foods to either make them last forever without spoiling, or to make them taste like something that resembles food. We know that drinking fruit juice is like drinking syrup, in that it is possible to consume far more energy than we need, or that we could ever consume if we got our juice from eating fruits. We know that children are developing a scary new disease called NASH, which leads to their livers being damaged permanently, due to eating too much fructose in their diets.

We know that if we cook our own foods, we are not going to put ingredients in there that we don’t understand. We know that if we get our vegetables at the store we will figure out how to cook with them, even if we have never heard of them before. We know that these vegetables have no artificial ingredients in them. We know that if we eat fruits we cannot eat enough of them to overdose on their juices. We know that if we want to change our diets and our lives we have to approach the task one small change at a time.

It’s just that easy.

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It’s Easier To Preach

Posted on June 23, 2014 by dcarmack

It's easier to preach than it is to live, or so they say. I am entertaining family for the next few days, and I am getting to spread the good word about diet, sugar, ingredients and how to shop. They are getting a crash course in the things that my loyal readers have been getting spread out over the past three months. I hope I am not wearing their patience out.

I think that the thing that is hardest to hear is that it's not hard to get control of your diet and health, and that you need not take pills for your blood pressure or blood sugar. You feel bad because of bad habits that you have developed over all of the years of you life. Getting control of all of this is habits. Losing bad ones and gaining and enforcing good ones.

I enjoy the thought of helping the people I love to make their lives better. I love the thought of them loving and learning to cook for themselves all over again. If we can help one another to live longer healthier lives, what is not to love? So today's post must necessarily be short.

I hope you all get to share how much better you feel with people you love this week. It really helps to have someone that doesn't share your knowledge about food and the food system get excited about the prospect of getting what you have. It enforces the goodness of the plan in your own mind. This stuff really does work, we really are right to get excited about it. It is really contagious, as I am finding out this morning!

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Plastic World

Posted on June 20, 2014 by dcarmack

I was reading this week in Mother Jones online magazine that it has been discovered (not by our government) that there is a great deal of plastic residue in most foods we cook. You may or may not of heard of BPA, the chemical that lots of plastics claim to be free of. BPA stands for bisphenol A. BPA is an industrial chemical that has been used to make certain plastics and resins since the 1960s. The FDA says that if you are the worrying type (like me) you can do these things to reduce your family’s exposure to the chemical:

  • Seek out BPA-free products. More and more BPA-free products have come to market. Look for products labeled as BPA-free. If a product isn’t labeled, keep in mind that some, but not all, plastics marked with recycle codes 3 or 7 may be made with BPA.
  • Cut back on cans. Reduce your use of canned foods since most cans are lined with BPA-containing resin.
  • Avoid heat. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, advises against microwaving polycarbonate plastics or putting them in the dishwasher, because the plastic may break down over time and allow BPA to leach into foods.
  • Use alternatives. Use glass, porcelain or stainless steel containers for hot foods and liquids instead of plastic containers.

There is debate in science about whether BPA is the only plastic that acts like the hormone estrogen in the body, and while they debate, I plan on assuming that it is not. BPA free may not mean estrogen-like-chemical-free, so no plastic will surround my foods.

It goes without saying that if you make no effort to limit your BPA exposure, you are getting exposed. The thing about the Mother Jones study though, was that they tested the foods cooked by people that were trying to get no plastic residue in their foods by eating locally produced food and dairy. The news here is that they were getting exposed even though they tried not to. It turned out that eating local was no protection from estrogen-like chemicals from plastics. Researchers then looked for the source, and found that the spices and dairy they were getting locally were the culprits. You should read the article, because the takeaway is that if your food is coming in plastic, you are eating plastic.

Personally I have begun only storing my bulk foods in Mason Jars, and they make really nice ones from half pint all the way to half gallon jars. They fit well in cabinets and on shelves and are better than a replacement for plastic canisters like tupperware. We have eliminated all of that kind of storage from our home. You can’t microwave food in them or cook in them, but that has not been a limitation at all.

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We plan on eating local foods from local sources, too, to limit our exposure to industrial herbicides and insecticides, but also to limit the exposure to industrial efforts to turn a profit without regard to it’s effect on my family. By that I mean adding antibiotics and hormones to meats so that the animal will grow unnaturally fast so that it can be harvested without eating so much food, etc.

In the Kansas City area there is a great online source of information about the local food movement, found here. Eat Local KC has links and collections of great information, like this table of local farmer’s markets. I eat at the Liberty market, and also at the market located in the River Quay area of Kansas City, the River Market. Nice thing about it is that it’s near a great spice purveyor at the Habishi House, and also at the Planters near the River Market. I wonder though about plastic contamination now in those spices. Dang you Mother Jones!

Please leave a comment if you currently use a local food provider. I would like to hear some comparisons of the choices we have around here for getting the produce from local farmers, specifically pastured chicken and pork. I know that I have a few friends who have tried it or are getting their fresh foods this way. Let’s hear from you. There is a comment box below!

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Eat The Living

Posted on June 19, 2014 by dcarmack

The best things to eat teem with life

Cheeses that stink with the odor of decay

Drinks that effervesce with gasses of digestion

Leaves still firm and green with energy

Fruits that beg us to carry their seeds within us

These things, if not alive, swarm with life

These creatures mingle with the life within us

The duties of these creatures is known only by them

We benefit from their energies, they eat things we cannot

Without them we whither and soon join our food

as their food

 

 

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Get With The Program

Posted on June 18, 2014 by dcarmack

There is only one way to make a killing selling food, and it takes more than just harvesting it and delivering it fresh and whole to your dining room table. No, the only way you will ever make a fortune on food is if you can turn what nature provides into something that will last at least three months as it makes its way through the system from the field, to the factory, to the warehouse, grocery store, and finally to your plate.

Nature’s products don’t fare so well in that supply chain. They must be harvested before their prime, treated with enzymes to ‘ripen’ them almost to the point of ripeness at the grocery and then put out for you to purchase. This system, while not ideal for the food, is pretty convenient for us, and not too bad for the grocer. We never get to taste what this food was meant to taste like. If you have ever lived where you could pick an orange off your own tree, you will never be tricked into thinking the one at the Hy Vee in Kansas City is a ‘real’ orange. The grocer doesn’t lose too much of his merchandise to spoilage before it can be sold. We still get real nutrients in the proper proportions, not too much sugar and no artificial things that may be a problem for a small percentage of us. Fresh foods are still the way to go.

Your average, garden-variety food conglomerate does not care to sell you fresh foods. They want you to think that their attempts at delivering food are getting better and better at approximating the real thing, or that their Franken-foods are almost like taking medicine, with all the added vitamins and nutrients that they have so thoughtfully provided. I predict that you will pay more in the future for foods that will promise not to destroy your liver by scarring it with fat deposits. Maybe the new drug that is being invented right now to combat the newest man-made disease of NASH (nonalcoholic steatohepatitis) can be added right into our breakfast cereals, the same way that pesticides today are engineered right into the seeds that farmers plant (never mind the poor honeybee).

Your government has proven to be absolutely powerless to assist us in this problem with our foods. I don’t know if the problem is campaign contributions, Senate filibusters, conservative politicians, ignorance, or what. It doesn’t matter to me in the least that my government refuses to help everyone all at once by passing a new law or strengthening an old one. At 53, I have come to learn that laws can be changed, in fact will be changed, so anything done to help now could be ignored, underfunded, or repealed at some point in the future, so any help that our government gives us can’t be counted on to continue, or be supported properly once enacted. The only power that can stop our food system from injuring me is me. I must not believe that any food I might find in a box is finally pure enough, or healthy enough, or enough like ‘good medicine’ for me to eat it. I know that there is NOBODY that is testing the man made ingredients that it contains for their efficacy or safety to me personally. Compared to the billions of years of testing and refining that nature has put into delivering her products to my table, the contest is over before it begins. Nature wins, and has my best interests in her heart. Convenience be damned, I can’t feed my family from the bowels of a system that is concerned with quarterly profits, first, foremost, and only.

Today in the Times, my old buddy Bittman once again calls for government intervention.

If the most profitable scenario means that most food choices are essentially toxic — in the sense that overconsumption will cause illness — that’s a failure of the market, not of individual choice. And government’s rightful role is not to form partnerships with industry so that the latter can voluntarily “solve” the problem, but to oversee and regulate industry. Its mandate is to protect public health, and one good step toward fulfilling that right now would be to regulate the marketing of junk to children. Anything short of that is a failure.

While I think that government has a proper role, the debate about that is hot and heavy. Some quarters of the government think it should be ‘every man for himself’ in the US, and that it is up to you to protect you and yours from the depredations of the market. Well, I have to agree with them that you CAN do that. Somehow we got industry to put seat belts in all of the cars, despite industry fighting it tooth and nail. You can’t buy heroin in the grocery store to cure your ‘headaches’ for some reason. Nothing can be done, however, about the poisons in our foods. Well, that is fodder for a debate in the future, I guess, because no one is debating this topic in the halls of Congress now, that I know of.

Industry is busy trying to capture the few organizations that might be able to wise us up about our real options, and their real effects on our health. Groups of nutritionists that convene are bombarded with booths manned by industry representatives, touting the great strides that they are making for our benefit. ‘Don’t turn people away from sugar,” they say, “Sugar is just a calorie, indifferent from any other calorie, no better or worse”. Is the message they want your dietitian to learn and pass on to you.

What would I change in our food system if I could? I would charge a toll on food travelling on our nations railroads and highways that goes up exponentially the farther the food must travel. If it costs fifty dollars per pound to eat foods from a factory on the opposite coast from you, then it would be worth producing foods close to home. The extra income could be used to turn unused highways and neighborhoods into productive cropland again. Never gonna happen, but I can dream.

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One Day at a Time

Posted on June 17, 2014 by dcarmack

Quitting is a moment to moment effort. Eating foods that you are in the process of quitting is a decision you make in the moment. Deciding to eat a sugary dessert is a decision that needs to be made ahead of time. For instance, if you make a half gallon of deluxe home made ice cream for a birthday party, you might decide that when the time comes, you are going to enjoy a taste of it with the rest of your guests. Eating sugar that way, mindfully, and intentionally is never going to be a problem for you. If you are serious about cutting habitual sugar consumption out of your family’s menu then you will have to make these decisions in this way.

Your main problem is going to be cutting the sugars out of your diet that you do not put in. Buying reduced fat milk is a perfect example of this. You are trying to cut sugars out of your diet and you are buying low fat milk thinking that low fat is a laudable goal for your family, and the maker of the milk has included sugar to replace the flavor that they took out when they reduced the fat. Think about it, if the label on the milk carton said, “sweetened milk” instead of “2% Low Fat” would you be more or less likely to purchase it? It would in fact be the most accurate label you could put on it, “Sweetened 2% Low Fat Milk”.

In fact every reduced fat product out there contains a corresponding increase in a carbohydrate, so you have to be ever vigilant when making your purchases, and you have to be mindful not only when making mealtime decisions, but when making menu decisions at the store. There are a great number of moments in the market when you have to be on your toes to avoid bringing hidden sugars and starches into your diet from there.

Yesterday I had to make decisions based on a change in my work schedule. Suddenly finding out that you will be at work for sixteen hours when you went to work ready for eight is a big change to the day’s eating plans. Now I would not be eating at home, but I would be eating from food that I had at work. Sometimes that involves getting a carry out sandwich (bread), sometimes it involves eating canned or bagged food from a vending machine (mystery), and sometimes I am ready with leftovers from home, which is in fact what happened yesterday. The leftovers though included rice, and sweet baked beans from trips to restaurants from last week and weekend. It was a lot of starches and some sugars, but my choices were severely restricted, due to the rural area I work in. I decided that what I had on hand was the least bad choice of a range of bad choices. In order to be more prepared for this eventuality, I need to be mindful of this need when I am making buying decisions at the grocery store my next trip. I have let my stock of reduced sugar and starch-free foods dwindle and yesterday I paid for that with restless sleep due to carbs burning off in my system.

The absolutely most important thing to do if you find that you have to violate your eating principles is to renew your commitment to your principles. If your plans fail, make new, improved plans as soon as possible. If you know that you unintentionally ate foods that you didn’t cook, that you had to by circumstance, or that turned out to be bad for you, then you need to think about how you came to be in that situation. Any time your plans are proven to need correction, then this bad outcome can be turned into a great outcome by providing you with an occasion to change your mind. Changing your mind for the better is what smart people do when they figure out they are not as smart as they thought they were. Who among us really is?

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A Sample of the decisions I have to make. This just showed up for us to decide to eat or not at our morning coffee break.

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Even the Pope Must Confess

Posted on June 16, 2014 by dcarmack

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To backslide is human, to forgive yourself is the only way to move forward. Even his holiness the Pope has sins that he must ask for forgiveness for.

This weekend was one of ‘those’ weekends. The birthday celebration was for my adult son, the day before he returned to his Naval duties on a submarine in Hawaii. This called for a celebration and we went to our favorite Kansas City ribs joint (Jack Stack) and enjoyed lots of things on the ‘non-sin’ list, but a couple of things that were sins. I confess that I really enjoyed my one-third of a lava cake with ice cream, and my one third of a big plate of french fries. Definitely ate the wrong kind of sugar and processed potatoes, probably ate the wrong kind of fats.

At the movie just an hour later it was all I could do to keep my eyes open for the 3D spectacle of the back story of Sleeping Beauty. Warfare and CGI wizardry are no match for the chemical depressants your body turns sugars and carbs into. The wife fared no better, and by the time we got home it was lights out. A few weeks out of the wasteland of the typical US diet have left us totally unaccustomed to the ill effects of one night in it.

However, we live to fight on! The struggle is renewed, and I am sure that by this time tomorrow all of the negative remnants will be gone from my system and I will be back on track. One of the best strategies for breaking bad habits, eating or otherwise, is to not see one lost battle as the end of the war. The war on sugar continues. I have absolved myself of my sins this weekend, and I will think of them no more.

Go easy on yourself if your Father’s Day celebration involved unusual amounts of sweetness, just don’t make it a habit.

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Preschool Foie Gras…

Posted on June 15, 2014 by dcarmack

…As in paté. The main ingredient in Foie Gras is duck liver, and the liver must contain lots of liver-fat. In order to find a duck with a fatty liver, in France they force-feed corn to the ducks. In nature you cannot find a duck with a fatty liver. One other place you can find liver-fat though is in the livers of the children of the richest country in the world.

Yesterday’s New York Times contained the most frightening article I have read in a very long time concerning the health of our nation. 

In Los Angeles, liver disease is diagnosed in one out of two obese Hispanic children, and it is a leading cause of premature death in Hispanic adults.

Think there is something special about LA or Hispanics? Don’t. Liver Disease caused by accumulated fat is now nicknamed NASH (nonalcoholic steatohepatitis). It leads to liver scarring and cirrhosis. We should all know what cirrhosis leads to.

Three decades ago, NASH was so rare that there was no medical name for it. Many doctors assumed that fat that accumulated in the liver was fairly harmless. But today, NASH is a growing strain on liver clinics and the fastest rising cause of liver transplants.

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Thirty years ago, this disease did not exist. Now, ten percent of all liver transplants are due to it.

“I’m really afraid that the explosion of this condition is going to overrun the resources available to the transplant centers around the country,” Dr. Busuttil said. “In the United States right now, we do about six to seven thousand liver transplants a year. Can you imagine if we have millions of people on the list? It’s unfathomable.”

No drugs are available to treat it. Transplanting a good liver into a person that already destroyed one liver as a child is hardly a cure, either. The sick thing is that we know already what is causing this. Sugar. Artificial and natural sugar eaten in approximately every bite of food a child eats is killing them.

How is this any different than rolling tobacco up into convenient cigarettes and then marketing them to children? The tobacco companies finally had to admit that their product was harmful and then pay every state in the nation for the health care costs of the people that they hooked on tobacco. Someday very soon, the companies that are putting deadly ingredients into our children’s foods are going to find themselves in the same boat.

Drug companies are busily figuring out how they can make a pill (CHA-CHING) that your children will have to take every day of their lives so that they can continue to eat their Captain Crunch with low-fat milk in the morning, Dominoes Pizza at school lunch with a Coke, and Happy Meal with a big Coke and fries for dinner at night. Poison three meals a day and then a pill or three all day long so that you can keep not eating real food, and the money can keep flowing upstream to the food conglomerates and the drug cartels.

If you would give your child a drug to counteract the deadly drug you have been giving them every bite and drink since they got their baby teeth, then I don’t know what to say about that.

I hope that my children, after reading this, stop immediately feeding their kids low-fat anything, any kind of fruit juices, any kind of boxed breakfast or lunch, and immediately start feeding them real food, packaged by good old mother nature. The consequences of taking what they are giving us without a care in the world are now known to be over, and not changing your eating habits as a result is insane, ruinously expensive, and a fatal mistake.

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A Bagel Is No Different Than A Bag Of Skittles To Your Body

Posted on June 13, 2014 by dcarmack

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People, when they find out that science has changed the consensus opinion about a topic always have the same reaction “There they go again, first it’s bad for you, then it’s good for you!” In the 1950s science concluded, mostly through the work of one influential scientist, that saturated fats were unhealthy and caused heart disease. As it turns out, his research was a victim of his biases, and his conclusions were reached before the data was all in. When this happens in the field of science, the system of using ‘The Scientific Method’ will eventually determine the flaws, the research will be overturned, and the science gets better, more accurately following the dictates of the facts. The damning of fats had it’s gut-level attraction, making a sort of man on the street sense. This week in Time Magazine, there is a wonderful article detailing the history of the science, and it’s metamorphosis lately: (article requires login, but its free)

The idea that saturated fat is bad for us makes a kind of instinctive sense, and not just because we use the same phrase to describe both the greasy stuff that gives our steak flavor and the pounds we carry around our middles. Chemically, they’re not all that different. The fats that course through our blood and accumulate on our bellies are called triglycerides, and high levels of triglycerides have been linked to heart disease. It doesn’t take much of an imaginative leap to assume that eating fats would make us fat, clog our arteries and give us heart disease. “It sounds like common sense–you are what you eat,” says Dr. Stephen Phinney, a nutritional biochemist who has studied low-carb diets for years.

Advertising, marketing, and production of food changed virtually overnight, demonizing the natural foods, and hailing the newly tooled and reconfigured man-made foods.

The food industry is nothing if not inventive. Faced with a fatwa against fat in the 1980s, manufacturers adjusted, lining grocery shelves with low-fat cookies, crackers and cakes. The thinking for consumers was simple: Fat is dangerous, and this product has no fat; therefore it must be healthy…But without fat, something had to be added, and Americans wound up making a dangerous trade. “We just cut fat and added a whole lot of low-fat junk food that increased caloric intake,” says Dr. David Katz, the founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center.

The War On Fat was on, things like lard were replaced by things like Crisco, butter by Blue Bonnet. For decades we were encouraged to drink low-fat milk, where the fat was replaced with sugar. Low in fat meant high in carbs, but we were never let in on how food science accomplished making low fat foods still taste like food. No agency or person was in charge of checking the products for their effects on the population in something like a drug trial. If any of these theories had been tested in the lab of real people we would not currently have the diabetes and hypertension epidemic we are currently suffering through.

Even experts like Harvard’s Hu, who says people shouldn’t be concerned about total fat, draw the line at fully exonerating saturated fat. “I do worry that if people get the message that saturated fat is fine, they’ll [adopt] unhealthy habits,” he says. “We should be focusing on the quality of food, of real food.”

Real Food is the magic bullet. Never stated in this article as a definitive panacea but alluded to. Processed foods cannot replace the nutrition you lose by eating it instead of real food. The fact is that no scientist knows what nutrients in real foods are the important ones. Vitamins have been proven to not be beneficial in most cases when eaten outside of their normal natural packaging. You cannot mix up asparagus in the lab. When taken apart to it’s constituent molecules and eaten that way, asparagus is not the same. This too, makes intuitive sense, but for some reason we want to eat our foods this way.

How we eat–whether we cook it ourselves or grab fast-food takeout–matters as much as what we eat. So don’t feel bad about the cream in your coffee or the yolks in your eggs or the occasional steak with béarnaise if you’ve got the culinary chops–but don’t think that the end of the war on fat means all the Extra Value Meals you can eat. As Katz puts it, “the cold hard truth is that the only way to eat well is to eat well.”

No person who cooks the proper foods will be able to overeat. A gigantic bowl of stir fried vegetables will completely satisfy the hugest appetite, but the eater will not have consumed too many calories. Cooking with real fats, lard, butter, coconut oil adds something real to real food. Cooking with engineered fats adds something to food too. It’s not real, it’s not food.

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